Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
been constructed to accommodate visitation
Restoration
• the restoration and conservation of historic sites and buildings
•
reuse of the facades of heritage buildings
Source:
after Page (1995a: 147)
1997; Hall and Lew 1998; Briassoulis and van der Straaten 1999; Gössling 2003; Mason
2003; Gössling and Hall 2005). Where the geographer has employed techniques from
environmental science such as Environmental Assessment (EA), the spatial consequences
of tourism and recreation activity have not always been fully appreciated. For example,
Page (1992) reviewed the impact of the Channel Tunnel project on the natural and built
environment and yet the generative effects of new tourist trips had been weakly
articulated in the mountains of documents describing the effects to be mitigated, failing to
recognise how this might impact on destination areas. Again, planners and researchers
had failed to recognise how recreational and tourist behaviour cannot easily be
incorporated into spatially specific plans for individual infrastructure projects which will
have knock-on effects for other parts of the tourism system. Page (1999) also reviews the
role of geographers in developing more meaningful appraisals of environmental impacts
resulting from tourist transport and the need to scrutinise private sector claims of
minimising environmental impacts. Nevertheless, tourism's impacts on the natural
environment have often been exaggerated. This is because the impacts of tourism have
often failed to be distinguished from other forms of development impact or even such
factors as overpopulation, poor agricultural practice or poor resource management
(Mercer 2000). This is not to say that tourism has not affected the environment. Yet, what
is often at issue are aesthetic or cumulative impacts rather than effects that can be related
solely to tourism development, such an observation may apply both with respect to
individual species, such as sharks (Pollard et al. 1996), albatross (Higham 1998) and
dolphins and whales (Orams 2005), specific environments, such as caves (Baker and
Genty 1998), and locations, for example the Great Barrier Reef (Lawrence et al. 2002).
Indeed, to focus on tourism as a form of negative impact on the natural environment is to
miss the far greater environmental problems which arise from other forms of economic
development, such as depletion of fisheries and forest resources and the loss of
biodiversity, and the overall lack of monitoring and management of many environments
(Farrell and Marion 2001).
For example, in the South Pacific, a region threatened by major environmental
problems (Hall and Page 1996), there has been no systematic study of the environmental
impacts of tourism over the region as a whole. Data and information are highly
fragmented (Milne 1990). Baseline data, i.e. information regarding the condition of the
natural environment prior to tourism development, are invariably lacking. Even in
Australia, one of the most economically developed nations in the region, information
about the environmental impacts of tourism is relatively poor (Warnken and Buckley
2000) and, where it does exist, it tends to be available for areas, such as national parks or
reserves, which are under government control, rather than for private lands (Hall 1995;
Sun and Walsh 1998). In addition, development specific reports, such as environmental
impact statements on resort or tourism developments, required by law in many western
countries, are often not required in the countries of the South Pacific because
